Catherine Mackey and Alex Garcia, “The Poetry of Wood”
by DeWitt Cheng
TINT Gallery, San Francisco, California
Exhibition continues through October 27, 2024
September 21, 2024
Catherine Mackey, “Pasquetti — Aged Ochres,” 2024, oil and mixed media on wood panel, 30 x 30”.
All images courtesy of TINT Gallery, San Francisco.
“The Poetry of Wood” brings together eleven wall-mounted assemblages by Alex Garcia and twelve drawings and paintings by Catherine Mackey. Both San Francisco artists have architectural training and share a contemporary recycle/reuse/repurpose ethic. Each explores wood as motif and material, revealing the hidden poetry of old buildings; Garcia and Mackey are visual archaeologists.
Mackey juxtaposes her views of weathered barns — some realistic, others more expressionist — with swatches of collaged text from tattered old street posters, imagining their lost glory days. The effect is reminiscent of the words emerging from Cubist and Futurist paintings depicting the sensory overload of modern life circa 1910. “Lemmon Canyon — Weathered Grays” and “Pasquetti — Aged Ochres” are oil-on-panel portrayals of dilapidated barns, stable triangular structures despite their missing planks, depicted in elevation view, straight-on and sideways from a distance. Mackey renders her subjects with the dispassion of Bernd and Hilla Becher, but the bright color accents from the collaged text elements lend a contrasting festive note.
Catherine Mackey, “Beautiful Annihilation,” 2024, oil and mixed media on wood panel, 48 x 30”.
More dramatic are the two “Vishi Barn Collapse” works on paper, with their impenetrable gray-brown tangles of beams, posts and planks suggesting shipwreck, explosion, or implosion. More abstract are the colorful squashed buildings in “Beautiful Annihilation” and “Sinking into a Soft Caul of Forgetfulness,” its title adapted from Sylvia Plath’s poem on the onset of sleep and winter, “Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond.”
Alex Garcia, “Emancipation,” 2024, stain on wood, steel and aluminum, 30 x 21”.
Garcia salvages fragments from collapsing ranch buildings in West Marin County into elegant, semi-abstract constructions that will endure, sheltered, indoors, in your imagination — perhaps accompanied by the reclaimed-wood furniture that the artist has made for twenty years. While some of the wall-mounted sculptures retain their original rectangular shapes, though carved by the artist, others suggest pictures and narratives, albeit mysterious and playful ones. That makes Garcia a successor of sorts to Klee, Kandinsky, and Ernst.
“Emancipation” is a small wooden panel to which steel rods have been affixed, suggesting a teepee tripod rising from the black arc of the earth into a vivid deep pink sky, A handful of rungs spanning two of the poles suggests a rickety ladder and a short-lived freedom. “That Tree on the Hill” is a spindly array of metal rods that suggests only the most nominal of trees — or, just as convincingly, old television aerials. “Tale of a Whale” is an assemblage composed of two weathered boards. One suggests a stylized whale, and the other a ship (or maybe the whale’s lower jaw). The pieces connected by metal rods read as teeth or harpoons in this fish story. “Orbiting the Green Planet” and “Arrival” are evocative little abstract landscapes (made with the assistance of the late Beto Toscano). Composed of various textures and colors of found wood, they have the appearance of countries for tiny denizens who are yet to arrive — or have already gone.
Alex Garcia, “Tale of a Whale,” 2024, wood and aluminum, 26 x 72”.
Mackey’s expressionist architectural views and Garcia’s intuitive, elegant fabrications are complementary, and well paired: a vanishing past and an imaginary future are caught and preserved in, by, and for the evanescent present.
